


Sister Self

by pprfaith



Series: tumblr ficlets from hell [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Guardians of the Galaxy - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Because I have apparently fallen down the rabbit hole after all, Gen, I will make a tag of this, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Oh god, Past Torture, Post Movie, REENA MADE ME DO IT, Spoilers, Tumblr ficlet, Violence, just wait
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-04
Updated: 2014-10-23
Packaged: 2018-02-19 20:33:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2402012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reena_Jenkins said: <i>Buffy and Faith as daughters of Thanos. </i></p><p>I couldn't keep my mouth shut.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reena_jenkins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/gifts).



> It's a tumblr ficlet. Do not expect Shakespeare.

+

Somewhere, somehow, in the aftermath of the most _insane_ thing Peter has ever seen, Buffy slips away. 

It doesn’t take Peter long to notice, but it does take a while for him to be able to do anything about it, since the Ravagers and the Nova Corps aren’t exactly on the best of terms and he has to play mediator, which, let’s face it, he sucks at.

Rocket’s running commentary in the background isn’t helping, but he’s addressing all his observations to the stick in his hand that might be Groot, or might be dead wood, and no-one, not even Nova Prime, feels like stopping him. Drax hangs back, too, but he snarls at everyone who implies anything at all about Peter, so that's cool. Not productive at all, but cool. 

Eventually, Ravagers and Nova don’t so much agree, as simply run out of steam and Peter books it out of the mostly destroyed headquarters like his ass is on fire. He makes sure to crank his Walkman to max, so he can rightfully claim not to hear them shouting after him. 

He finds Buffy sitting in the wreckage of the Dark Sunflower, or whatever Ronan’s phallic symbol was called. She’s not doing anything, just sitting there, knees drawn up, forearms slung over them. The pink ends of her hair are blowing around her face and the prosthetic of her left arm still sparks occasionally. Peter makes a mental note to find out what Rocket knows about cybernetics. 

She looks up when he drops down on… something, a few feet away. The skin on her left cheek and temple is badly abraded and he can see the steely glint of her implants underneath. Peter has always been terrified of the things that the rest of the universe seems totally okay with shoving into their bodies. He got the universal translator, because Yondu insisted, but that was it. He’s _human_ and he’s going to stay that way, thanks a lot. 

Buffy hates her implants. He could tell, almost at first sight. The way she avoids mirrors and hides her strange cheekbones behind a curtain of blonde-pink hair, the way she uses her flesh arm for most things. Thanos probably didn’t stop to ask for permission before he tore her body to bits and replaced what he didn’t like, so, yeah, Peter gets it. 

After about five minutes (he recites all of Cherry Bomb in his head), his patience runs out and he breaks the silence. “I’m sorry,” he says. “About… Faith.”

He’s always found it weird that one of the Daughters of Thanos is named after something as fundamentally human as belief, but there it is. Faith, Thanos’ other pet project. The successful one, looking at Buffy. The loyal one. 

She laughs, bitterly. “She’s not dead, Quill. It takes a lot more than that to kill my sister.”

Not really surprised. He’s seen Buffy float around space for minutes on end and wake up from it like it was a nap. Thanos did many terrible things to them, but you have to hand it to him: he did a thorough job. 

Peter shakes his head. “You love her,” he observes, not really sure if he’s accusing her. Probably not. Yondu’s tried to kill him, oh, five times in the past week? And he still loves the man. Some shit can’t be helped. 

Buffy shrugs. “We were sisters long before Thanos found us. Back when we were…,” she trails off, shrugs, raises her sparking forearm in the air. Human. Something. Peter’s not actually sure where his new friend is from. 

Silence falls again and he bites his tongue, he really does, to wait until Buffy starts talking again. Because something is bothering her and he can’t shoot it, so he’ll just have to wait it out. 

“We made each other a promise,” she whispers. “In the beginning. That if one of us got the chance, we’d kill the other.”

“What? Why would you…? Why?”

She fiddles inside her arm, twists a few wires together. The sparking increases, then stops. If she feels anything in that limb, it doesn’t show on her face. “We were protectors, on our world. Guardians. What he did to us… what he made us do… it went against everything we are… were.” Another shrug. “Our kind always died young. We were okay with it. But then….”

She drops the prosthetic her side with a disgusted grunt, hides it out of sight. “One day, it was like Faith just flipped the switch. Just… turned it off. What we were, what we promised each other. And she was Thanos’ perfect weapon and I….”

He can see her skin knitting back together over the metal, if he doesn’t blink.

“The Faith she was, the girl who fought hell with me, she’d want me to end it. To keep my promise. But if I kill her, then I’m alone, and I don’t think… I can’t be alone, Peter. Not….”

Not as the monster she is now. Peter wonders, sometimes, what going home would be like. Checking if Gramps is still alive, seeing all his aunts and uncles again. But what he is now, the things he’s done, he doesn’t think he can. He can only imagine what Buffy feels like. 

“You know you’re not alone anymore, right?” he asks, because he feels like he has to. A human, a maniac racoon, a stick, and a literal-minded meat-grinder might not be ideal, but Peter honestly thinks they’ll stick together now. Even if he has to melt himself down into glue. 

“And if you want to hunt your sister down and… keep your promise, then we’re in.”

She snorts. It’s better than all the listless shrugging. “You blew up your ship. You blew up _all_ the ships.”

With a huff, he points a finger at her. “And saved the galaxy!”

Buffy rolls her eyes. Peter likes to believe it’s fond. “You’re an idiot.”

“Oh,” Rocket snarks from a hole in the hull, “good. Does that mean you’re done now? Because we have things to do, people to kill, and a pot to find.”

“A pot?”

The little guy holds up the Groot stick. Drax nods gravely in the background. 

A pot. 

What the hell.

Peter hunts through his pockets until he finds a bandage seal and reaches over, slapping it over the worst of the damage in Buffy’s arm. The bandage activates and moulds itself to her skin. If he squints, he almost can’t see the metal anymore. He nods, then offers her his hand and pulls her to her feet with a flourish.

She smiles.

“Pot,” he says, by way of explanation.

“Pot,” she agrees, and reaches under his coat to turn on his Walkman. 

She leads the way out of the wreckage to the first notes of the Pina Colada Song.

+


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And the encore no-one asked for.

+

(They grow to hate each other.

They grow to hate each other in their cells, on surgical steel tables, in observation rooms, and training pits. 

Not because they hurt each other, no, pain has become commonplace, normal, welcome. (They replaced Faith’s heart with gleaming steel and wires in the third year.) They grow to hate each other because they hurt for each other, because they weep and scream and rage for the memory of the girls they once were. (Faith remembers Big Sister, standing at the edge of that roof, calling for her, reaching, regret in her soft eyes, and wishes she were sixteen again, and salvageable.)

They grow to hate each other because love is not something they are capable of anymore. All burned away and scorched clean, they are. (Technologically enhanced slayer skin can withstand direct contact with an open flame for up to ten seconds.)

They grow to hate each other because they were girls once, even when they were weapons, but now they are monsters. (The first time Buffy kills a child, she doesn’t even notice, just keeps on cutting until she runs out of flesh to rend.)

They grow to hate each other and their promise becomes a moot thing because why would you show pity for a sister you despise? Why would you kill her and grant her freedom?

They fight on the Dark Aster like they have fought on Thanos’ battlefields for fifty years, viciously and without holding back. They fight like people who loved each other and forgot how. They fight like sisters.

Faith smiles, in the end, with teeth and blood and sparking wires, and says, “I hated you least.”

She lets go. (There is a glider coming her way with just the right trajectory.)

Buffy kneels at the edge, reaching for her, wishing she were eighteen again, and capable of grief. 

(She’s not.)

The war rages on.)

+


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reena_Jenkins wanted Adam being GotG Buffy and Faith’s big brother, come to punish them. And since she made me art and stuff for this pretty verse, she gets what she wants. :)

+

Six months after Xandar, Buffy gets a wave.

Peter, sitting in the pilot’s chair, doesn’t think much of it, until Groot, sitting by her elbow, starts making agitated groaning noises. He’s recently outgrown his first pot and is now almost as tall as someone’s (not Rocket’s) arm. But he still doesn’t talk.

As soon as Groot starts making noise, Peter and Rocket converge on Buffy’s station. They stare, dumbfounded, at the message on the screen.

 _Hey sister_ , it reads, _big brother is mad._

Instead of a signature, there’s a string of coordinates. They stare at it, disbelieving that Faith, of all people, apparently wants a meet. Faith, who tried to kill her own sister and has been causing no end of trouble for them for the past half year. She’s not with Thanos anymore, but she plays for whoever pays best and that’s usually the people who want the Guardians dead.

“What the hell does that even mean?” Rocket asks, after a beat of silence.

 

Buffy shrugs, her colourful hair bouncing. She taps the screen with her cybernetic fingers. “It means Faith needs help.”

“And you want to _give it to her_?” Peter demands. His voice does not squeak. It does not. Groot makes a soothing noise at him, lips pursed.

Buffy seems unperturbed. “Against big brother? Yes. Because when he’s done with her, he’ll come after me. Thanos sent him to punish us. Fighting together is the smart thing.” She says it like it’s a perfectly reasonable reaction to the two of them running from their torturer after years of agony.

“So you only want to save your own skinny hide?” Rocket wants to know. He doesn’t sound like he believes a word of Buff’s reasoning. Honestly, Peter doesn’t either. Buffy and her sister are… weird. And complicated and violent. Mostly violent.

The last time they ran into her, Faith almost took his head off. With a pocket knife. Only Drax’ timely entrance saved his ass. Speaking off, the big guy comes climbing up into the cockpit just then, a frown on his face. “I heard raised voices, is everything alright?”

Rocket snorts. “Apart from assassin girl going back to her roots? Everything is fantastic. Go back to hugging your knives, squishy.”

Drax, who has gotten somewhat used to the rodent in the past months, snarls at him, but does nothing else. Good. Because a fist fight between those two is, despite the size difference, surprisingly destructive and he just cleaned up in here.

Buffy shuts down the wave and turns to face them. “I’m not going back… this is different. And you don’t know the story.”

“Well then,” the racoon demands. “Lay it on me. Come on. I’d really like to hear it.” His mouth is mostly teeth and his fur is bristling. Peter remembers that Rocket almost got dead, too, during their last Faith Encounter, capitals totally necessary.

Buffy grimaces, because she _hates_ sharing, but leans back in her chair, crossing one leg over the other with a little whisper of metal on leather. Peter tried to get her some synth skin, early on, for her arm at least, maybe her leg, too, but she flat out refused, wearing her torture scars and forced implants with a pride born from defiance. Half the people they meet still try to kill her on sight, and she keeps taking it, head held high. He can respect that, if only because she’ll kill him if he doesn’t.

“Faith and I were just kids when Thanos came. We were the chosen two of our world, engineered to fight battles no-one else could. And when Thanos came from the sky, we fought him, too. He captured us, because he saw we were special. And he captured Adam, too. He was a soldier, regular old human. Worthless, really. But Faith and I, we were precious. So everything Thanos wanted done to us, he first had done to Adam because he was replaceable, but we weren’t.”

Peter has seen the way Buffy heals, the way she takes pain, and he imagines the things done to her, done to someone without those extras. Times two, because, as far as he can tell, she and her sister were modified in completely different ways.

Everytime he thinks he’s done getting sick over that fucker…

“Adam was mind-wiped, eventually, because he went completely insane. Since then, he’s… he’s a machine, really, not a person anymore. He doesn’t have the autonomy to refuse orders. And he is stronger than us. I’m absolutely sure Thanos sent him to punish us. Together, we stand a chance of killing him. Apart, he’ll get us both.”

She focuses her gaze back on the room suddenly, eyes fierce and cold. “I am not going back,” she says, and it sounds like a promise. She’ll die first, and so will they, before they let her.

Damn it.

“Jesus,” Peter mutters and turns toward the stairs, intent on finding something boozy to wipe his brain. Rocket snaps, “Grab the pot,” at Drax and follows. Apparently, they are all getting drunk together.

Fucking Thanos.

For fuck’s sake.

Peter wonders, sometimes, what their assassin was like, before she was taken from the ruins of her home, but then he always decides not to ask, because she might tell him and then he’d know everything that was lost and that’s just, no. At least Peter knows that his home world still exists, knows that his family is probably safe, what’s left of it.

At least the worst Yondu ever did to him was beat the snot out of him when he screwed up too badly.

+

They get drunk. They get very, very drunk.

And then they sleep.

And when Peter wakes, four hours later, with his head throbbing, he knows without knowing how that he needs to make a beeline for the cockpit. Buffy is in his chair, watching the computer plot a course toward new coordinates.

When he enters, she looks up. “I’ll get off, you can be on your way,” she says, no apology in her voice.

He’s too drunk for this. He slumps onto one of Rocket’s boom crates and asks, “Why?”

“Because you don’t want to be involved.”

He glares at her. She rolls her eyes. “Because she’s my sister.”

“And how do you know it’s not a trap?”

She smiles, but it’s not a very nice one. “Because I’m her sister, too.”

+

They don’t drop her off and swan into the black. Rocket bitches, Drax questions everything, and Groot coos a lot, but they head with Buffy to the meeting point, which turns out to be an abandoned plant of some sort on an abandoned planet, which isn’t creepy at all.

No-one really wants to be here, but they’re a team, damnit, and if they didn’t space Drax for actively calling Ronan down on them, they’re not abandoning Buffy. Team. Team. Team. Peter keeps repeating it, out loud, just in case any of the others try to go walkies.

Faith drops out of the rafters in a suitably dramatic entrance, sneering at everyone and flicking a knife from one hand to the other. The blue nanotech sheen of her skin makes her look eerie in the dim emergency lighting and Peter really wants to either a) run away of b) kill her dead.

“Team,” he reminds himself, voice low. He can totally stand here and do neither. Team.

She dismisses them with a smirk, knowing exactly what she does to him, he’ll bet, and turns to her sister. “B,” she says.

“Fay,” Buffy answers, and this is all very dramatic. Peter doesn’t like it.

“I see you brought your toys.”

“Friends, Faith. They’re my friends.”

The brunette woman snorts. “Fantastic. Do you think they’ll die like the last set, too?”

Faster than the human eye can follow, Buffy has her sister pinned against a support strut, hand around her throat, squeezing. Faith laughs, her knife against the other’s jugular.

“What the hell do you want, Faith?” Buffy snarls, and Peter hates her like this, because when she gets like this, cold and deadly, all he can see is the Daughter of Thanos, not his friend, who sometimes dances to his Awesome Mixtapes when she thinks no-one is watching.

Instead of a verbal answer, the blue assassin pulls up her shirt one-handed, revealing a nasty looking cut going from her right hip all the way to her sternum, red and angry and not healing. Looks like she already survived one family reunion on the past few days. “Can’t take him alone, B,” she drawls by way of explanation. “’S gonna take both of us.”

Buffy snorts, letting her go. “What happened to you hating me?” she asks, derisively.

This time, Faith is the one with her hand on the other’s neck and she squeezes hard. “You abandoned me!” she roars, right in her sister’s face, smacking her backwards into the very same strut she was just up against. She puts enough force behind it that Peter can feel the building around them shudder.

Buffy brings up her arms, slams them into Faith’s elbows, twists herself free. “I left you behind,” she corrects, putting distance between them with a well-placed kick. Peter isn’t sure whether to go looking for popcorn or pull out his gun. Team. Team. Team. “And I came back for you!”

(She did. It was never about revenge, or about stopping Ronan from becoming a second Thanos. It was always about this, a blue sister and a promise. One way or another. She came back for Faith.)

Faith punches her square in the jaw and she retaliates by sweeping the other woman’s legs out from under her. Faith takes her down with her and then they roll around on the floor, punching, kicking, screaming and Drax twitches with every hit that lands, while Rocket rubs his paws together like this is the best thing he’s ever seen.

Groot looks disapproving.

The fight ends after a few minutes, when one of them kicks the other hard enough to send them both flying in opposite directions and Buffy yells, “Stop!”

Through some kind of miracle, Faith actually does, a sneer on her face and blood on her lips. “Bitch,” she bites out, wrenching her shoulder back in place.

“Asshole,” Buffy fires right back, standing with a limp that looks like a busted knee, at the very least. “I should break your damn neck.”

Then she hobbles over to her sister, bends down and offers her a hand up. Faith accepts it.

Peter has never been so glad to be an only child.

+

**Author's Note:**

> You can always throw in your own two cents [here](http://wordsformurder.tumblr.com/).


End file.
